In Persuasion Nation

by George Saunders

  Then it was spring and the quarry got busy. When the noon blast went off, our windows rattled. The three-o’clock blast was even bigger. Raccoon and Art and I made a fort from the cardboard shipping containers the Cline frames came in. One day, while pretending the three-o’clock blast was atomic, we saw Eddie the Vacant bounding toward our fort through the weeds, like some lover in a commercial, only fatter and falling occasionally.

  His trauma had made us kinder toward him.

  “Eddie,” Art said. “You tell your dad where you’re at?”

  “It no big problem,” Eddie said. “I was gone leave my dad a note.”

  “But did you?” said Art.

  “I’ll leave him a note when I get back,” said Eddie. “I gone come in with you now.”

  “No room,” said Raccoon. “You’re too huge.”

  “That a good one!” said Eddie, crowding in.

  Down in the quarry were the sad cats, the slumping watchman’s shack, the piles of reddish, discarded dynamite wrappings that occasionally rose erratically up the hillside like startled birds.

  Along the quarryside trail came Mrs. Poltoi, dragging a new shopping cart.

  “Look at that pig,” said Raccoon. “Eddie, that’s the pig that put you away.”

  “What did they do to you in there, Ed?” said Art. “Did they mess with you?”

  “No, they didn’t,” said Eddie. “I just a say to them, ‘Leave a guy alone!’ I mean, sometime they did, O.K.? Sometime that one guy say, ‘Hey, Eddie, pull your thing! We gone watch you.’ “

  “O.K., O.K.,” said Art.

  At dusk, the three of us would go to Mrs. H.’s porch. She’d bring out cookies and urge forgiveness. It wasn’t Poltoi’s fault her heart was small, she told us. She, Mrs. H., had seen a great number of things, and seeing so many things had enlarged her heart. Once, she had seen Göring. Once, she had seen Einstein. Once, during the war, she had seen a whole city block, formerly thick with furriers, bombed black overnight. In the morning, charred bodies had crawled along the street, begging for mercy. One such body had grabbed her by the ankle, and she recognized it as Bergen, a friend of her father’s.

  “What did you do?” said Raccoon.

  “Not important now,” said Mrs. H., gulping back tears, looking off into the quarry.

  Then disaster. Dad got a check for shoulder pads for all six district football teams and, trying to work things out with Mom, decided to take her on a cruise to Jamaica. Nobody in our neighborhood had ever been on a cruise. Nobody had even been to Wisconsin. The disaster was, I was staying with Poltoi. Ours was a liquor household, where you could ask a question over and over in utter sincerity and never get a straight answer. I asked and asked, “Why her?” And was told and told, “It will be an adventure.”

  I asked, “Why not Grammy?”

  I was told, “Grammy don’t feel well.”

  I asked, “Why not Hopanlitski?”

  Dad did this like snort.

  “Like that’s gonna happen,” said Mom.

  “Why not, why not?” I kept asking.

  “Because shut up,” they kept answering.

  Just after Easter, over I went, with my little green suitcase.

  I was a night panicker and occasional bed-wetter. I’d wake drenched and panting. Had they told her? I doubted it. Then I knew they hadn’t, from the look on her face the first night, when I peed myself and woke up screaming.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “Pee,” I said, humiliated beyond any ability to lie.

  “Ach, well,” she said. “Who don’t? This also used to be me. Pee pee pee. I used to dream of a fish who cursed me.”

  She changed the sheets gently, with no petulance-a new one on me. Often Ma, still half asleep, popped me with the wet sheet, saying when at last I had a wife, she herself could finally get some freaking sleep.

  Then the bed was ready, and Poltoi made a sweeping gesture, like, Please.

  I got in.

  She stayed standing there.

  “You know,” she said. “I know they say things. About me, what I done to that boy. But I had a bad time in the past with a big stupid boy. You don’t gotta know. But I did like I did that day for good reason. I was scared at him, due to something what happened for real to me.”

  She stood in the half-light, looking down at her feet.

  “Do you get?” she said. “Do you? Can you get it, what I am saying?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Tell to him,” she said. “Tell to him sorry, explain about it, tell your friends also. If you please. You have a good brain. That is why I am saying to you.”

  Something in me rose to this. I’d never heard it before but I believed it: I had a good brain. I could be trusted to effect a change.

  Next day was Saturday. She made soup. We played a game using three slivers of soap. We made placemats out of colored strips of paper, and she let me teach her my spelling words.

  Around noon, the doorbell rang. At the door stood Mrs. H.

  “Everything O.K.?” she said, poking her head in.

  “Yes, fine,” said Poltoi. “I did not eat him yet.”

  “Is everything really fine?” Mrs. H. said to me. “You can say.”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “You can say,” she said fiercely.

  Then she gave Poltoi a look that seemed to say, Hurt him and you will deal with me.

  “You silly woman,” said Poltoi. “You are going now.”

  Mrs. H. went.

  We resumed our spelling. It was tense in a quiet-house way. Things ticked. When Poltoi missed a word, she pinched her own hand, but not hard. It was like symbolic pinching. Once when she pinched, she looked at me looking at her, and we laughed.

  Then we were quiet again.

  “That lady?” she finally said. “She like to lie. Maybe you don’t know. She say she is come from where I come from?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She is lie,” she said. “She act so sweet and everything but she lie. She been born in Skokie. Live here all her life, in America. Why you think she talk so good?”

  All week, Poltoi made sausage, noodles, potato pancakes; we ate like pigs. She had tea and cakes ready when I came home from school. At night, if necessary, she dried me off, moved me to her bed, changed the sheets, put me back, with never an unkind word.

  “Will pass, will pass,” she’d hum.

  Mom and Dad came home tanned, with a sailor cap for me, and, in a burst of post-vacation honesty, confirmed it: Mrs. H. was a liar. A liar and a kook. Nothing she said was true. She’d been a cashier at Goldblatt’s but had been caught stealing. When caught stealing, she’d claimed to be with the Main Office. When a guy from the Main Office came down, she’d claimed to be with the F.B.I. Then she’d produced a letter from Lady Bird Johnson, but in her own handwriting, with “Johnson” spelled “Jonsen.”

  I told the other kids what I knew, and in time they came to believe it, even the Kletzes.

  And, once we believed it, we couldn’t imagine we hadn’t seen it all along.

  Another spring came, once again birds nested in bushes on the sides of the quarry. A thrown rock excited a thrilling upward explosion. Thin rivers originated in our swampy back yards, and we sailed boats made of flattened shoeboxes, Twinkie wrappers, crimped tinfoil. Raccoon glued together three balsa-wood planes and placed on this boat a turd from her dog, Svengooli, and, as Svengooli’s turd went over a little waterfall and disappeared into the quarry, we cheered.

  commcomm

  Tuesday morning, Jillian from Disasters calls. Apparently an airman named Loolerton has poisoned a shitload of beavers. I say we don’t kill beavers, we harvest them, because otherwise they nibble through our Pollution Control Devices (P.C.D.s) and polluted water flows out of our Retention Area and into the Eisenhower Memorial Wetland, killing beavers.

  “That makes sense,” Jillian says, and hangs up.

  The press has a field day. “air force kill
s beavers to save beavers,” says one headline. “murdered beavers speak of air force cruelty,” says another.

  “We may want to pids this,” Mr. Rimney says.

  I check the files: There’s a circa-1984 tortoise-related pids from a base in Oklahoma. There’s a wild-horse-related pids from North Dakota. Also useful is a Clinton-era pids concerning the inadvertent destruction of a dove breeding ground.

  From these I glean an approach: I admit we harvested the beavers. I concede the innocence and creativity of beavers. I explain the harvesting as a regrettable part of an ongoing effort to prevent Pollution Events from impacting the Ottowattamie. Finally I pledge we’ll find a way to preserve our PIDs without, in the future, harming beavers. We are, I say, considering transplanting the beaver population to an innovative Beaver Habitat, to be installed upstream of the Retention Area.

  I put it into PowerPoint. Rimney comes back from break and reads it.

  “All hail to the king of pids,” he says.

  I call Ed at the paper; Jason, Heather, and Randall at NewsTen, ActionSeven, and NewsTeamTwo, respectively; then Larry from Facilities. I have him reserve the Farragut Auditorium for Wednesday night, and just like that I’ve got a fully executable pids and can go joyfully home to my wife and our crazy energized loving kids.

  Just kidding.

  I wish.

  I walk between Mom and Dad into the kitchen, make those frozen mini-steaks called SmallCows. You microwave them or pull out their ThermoTab. When you pull the ThermoTab, something chemical happens and the SmallCows heat up. I microwave. Unfortunately, the ThermoTab erupts and when I take the SmallCows out they’re coated with a green, fibrous liquid. So I make Ramen.

  “You don’t hate the Latvians, do you?” Dad says to me.

  “It was not all Latvians done it,” Mom says.

  I turn on Tape 9, Omission/Partial Omission. When sadness-inducing events occur, the guy says, invoke your Designated Substitute Thoughtstream. Your DST might be a man falling off a cliff but being caught by a group of good friends. It might be a bowl of steaming soup, if one likes soup. It might be something as distractive/mechanical as walking along a row of cans, kicking them down.

  “And don’t even hate them two,” Mom says. “They was just babies.”

  “They did not do that because they was Latvian,” says Dad. “They did it because of they had poverty and anger.”

  “What the hell,” says Mom. “Everything turned out good.”

  My DST is tapping a thin rock wall with a hammer. When that wall cracks, there’s another underneath. When that wall cracks, there’s another underneath.

  “You hungry?” Mom says to Dad.

  “Never hungry anymore,” he says.

  “Me too,” she says. “Plus I never pee.”

  “Something’s off but I don’t know what,” Dad says.

  When that wall cracks, there’s another underneath.

  “Almost time,” Mom says to me, her voice suddenly nervous. “Go upstairs.”

  I go to my room, watch some World Series, practice my pids in front of the mirror.

  What’s going on down there I don’t watch anymore: Mom’s on the landing in her pajamas, calling Dad’s name, a little testy. Then she takes a bullet in the neck, her hands fly up, she rolls the rest of the way down, my poor round Ma. Dad comes up from the basement in his gimpy comic trot, concerned, takes a bullet in the chest, drops to his knees, takes one in the head, and that’s that.

  Then they do it again, over and over, all night long.

  Finally it’s morning. I go down, have a bagel.

  Our house has this turret you can’t get into from inside. You have to go outside and use a ladder. There’s nothing up there but bird droppings and a Nixon-era plastic Santa with a peace sign scratched into his toy bag. That’s where they go during the day. I climbed up there once, then never again: jaws hanging open, blank stares, the two of them sitting against the wall, insulation in their hair, holding hands.

  “Have a good one,” I shout at the turret as I leave for work.

  Which I know is dumb, but still.

  When I get to work, Elliot Giff from Safety’s standing in the Outer Hall. Giff’s a GS-9 with pink glasses and an immense underchin that makes up a good third of the length of his face.

  “Got this smell-related call?” he says.

  We step in. There’s definitely a smell. Like a mildew/dirt/decomposition thing.

  “We have a ventilation problem,” Rimney says stiffly.

  “No lie,” Giff says. “Smells like something crawled inside the wall and died. That happened to my aunt.”

  “Your aunt crawled inside a wall and died,” Rimney says.

  “No, a rat,” says Giff. “Finally she had to hire a Puerto Rican fellow to drill a hole in her wall. Maybe you should do that.”

  “Hire a Puerto Rican fellow to drill a hole in your aunt’s wall,” Rimney says.

  “I like how you’re funny,” Giff says. “There’s joy in that.”

  Giff’s in the ChristLife Reënactors. During the reënactments, they eat only dates and drink only grape juice out of period-authentic flasks. He says that this weekend’s reënactment was on the hill determined to be the most topographically similar to Calvary in the entire Northeast. I ask who he did. He says the guy who lent Christ his mule on Palm Sunday. Rimney says it’s just like Giff to let an unemployed Jew borrow his ass.

  “You’re certainly not hurting me with that kind of talk,” Giff says.

  “I suppose I’m hurting Christ,” says Rimney.

  “Not hardly,” says Giff.

  On Rimney’s desk is a photo of Mrs. Rimney before the stroke: braless in a tank top, hair to her waist, holding a walking stick. In the photo, Rimney’s wearing a bandanna, pretending to toke something. Since the stroke, he works his nine or ten, gets groceries, goes home, cooks, bathes Val, does the dishes, goes to bed.

  My feeling is, no wonder he’s mean.

  Giff starts to leave, then doubles back.

  “You and your wife are in the prayers of me and our church,” he says to Rimney. “Despite of what you may think of me.”

  “You’re in my prayers, too,” says Rimney. “I’m always praying you stop being so sanctimonious and miraculously get less full of shit.”

  Giff leaves, not doubling back this time.

  Rimney hasn’t liked Giff since the day he suggested that Rimney could cure Mrs. Rimney if only he’d elevate his prayerfulness.

  “All right,” Rimney says. “Who called him?”

  Mrs. Gregg bursts into tears and runs to the Ladies’.

  “I don’t get why all the drama,” says Rimney.

  “Hello, the base is closing in six months,” says Jonkins.

  “Older individuals like Mrs. G. are less amenable to quick abrupt changes,” says Verblin.

  When Closure was announced, I found Mrs. G. crying in the Outer Hall. What about Little Bill? she said. Little Bill had just bought a house. What about Amber, pregnant with twins, and her husband, Goose, drunk every night at the Twit? What about Nancy and Vendra? What about Jonkins and Al? There’s not a job to be had in town, she said. Where are all these sweet people supposed to go?

  I’ve sent out more than thirty résumés, been store to store, chatted up Dad’s old friends. Even our grocery’s half-closed. What used to be Produce is walled off with plywood. On the plywood is a sign: “If We Don’t Have It, Sorry.”

  CommComm’s been offered a group transfer to naivac Omaha. But Mom and Dad aren’t allowed into the yard, much less to Omaha. And when I’m not around they get agitated. I went to Albany last March for a seminar and they basically trashed the place. Which couldn’t have been easy. To even disturb a drape for them is a big deal. I walked in and Mom was trying to tip over the coffee table by flying through it on her knees and Dad was inside the couch, trying to weaken the springs via repetitive fast spinning. They didn’t mean to but were compelled. Even as they were flying/spinning they were apologizing pro
fusely.

  “Plus it really does stink in here,” Little Bill says.

  “Who all is getting a headache raise your hand,” says Jonkins.

  “Oh, all right,” Rimney says, then goes into my cubicle and calls Odors. He asks why they can’t get over immediately. How many odors do they have exactly? Has the entire base suddenly gone smelly?

  I walk in and he’s not talking into the phone, just tapping it against his leg.

  He winks at me and asks loudly how Odors would like to try coordinating Community Communications while developing a splitting headache in a room that smells like ass.

  All afternoon it stinks. At five, Rimney says let’s hope for the best overnight and wear scuba gear in tomorrow, except for Jonkins, who, as far as Jonkins, they probably don’t make scuba gear that humongous.

  “I cannot believe you just said that,” says Jonkins.

  “Learn to take a joke,” Rimney says, and slams into his office.

  I walk out with Jonkins and Mrs. Gregg. The big flag over the Dirksen excavation is snapping in the wind, bright-yellow leaves zipping past as if weighted.

  “I hate him,” says Jonkins.

  “I feel so bad for his wife,” says Mrs. Gregg.

  “First you have to live with him, then you have a stroke?” says Jonkins.

  “And then you still have to live with him?” says Mrs. Gregg.

  The Dirksen Center for Terror is the town’s great hope. If transferred to the Dirksen, you keep your benefits and years accrued and your salary goes up, because you’re Homeland Security instead of Air Force. We’ve all submitted our Requests-for-Transfer and our Self-Assessment Worksheets and now we’re just waiting to hear.

  Except Rimney. Rimney heard right away. Rimney knows somebody who knows somebody. He was immediately certified Highly Proficient and is Dirksen-bound, which, possibly, is another reason everybody hates him.

  My feeling is, good for him. If he went to Omaha, imagine the work. He and Val have a routine here, contacts, a special van, a custom mechanical bed. Imagine having to pick up and start over somewhere else.